“Remember everything.”

                  […]

“Oliver. I remember everything.” 

A story told in landscapes, in lines and in distances, “Call Me by Your Name” is a careful study in history, memory and the power of their intertwinement. From its pastorals — each a perfectly balanced Renaissance painting — to its score — which enunciates each emotion with crescendos that choke — it is a transcendence of plot and character and a jump straight into human emotion. Beyond telling the love story between two men — which it is, intrinsically and refreshingly, about two men — “Call Me by Your Name” is the story of history and the powerful tool of memory.

It is too often that we are wrapped up in memory, in telling ourselves the stories of our lives in order to reassure ourselves of their existence. To reassure ourselves of their permanence in some desperate attempt to self-validate. Some moments of our lives live only in memory, shrouded in dreamscale and overpowered by emotion. They are truthful lies, ones that exist only to the left of their reality.

“Call Me by Your Name” is just such a memory.

The film is a [sub]conscious melody of remembrance, a song composed by director Luca Guadagnino and performed by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom. It plays with our preconceived notions of how cinema should function and, most importantly, why it should function. It surely exists — the $16.18 I spent on it proves this — but its existence is tenuous and subjective, a reflection of both directorial vision and audience reflection. There is no concreteness to the film; it exists fleetingly. Like a song that reminds us of an ex, “Call Me by Your Name” feels nostalgically urgent, a dichotomous mirror of human nature.

The film’s plot is simple: a doctorate student, Oliver (Armie Hammer), arrives at the summer house of his mentoring professor, Mr. Perlman (Michael Stuhlbarg), and his family. The precocious (a concept which is etymologized early on in the film) professor’s son, Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), occupies himself with various hobbies; as he describes himself, he “reads books, transcribes music, swims in the river, goes out at night. Waits for the summer to end.” The quintessential recipe for summertime existentialism is detailed throughout the film: beautiful Italian campagna plus girls, music and art equals romantic listlessness.

Its portrayal of the summer is of a timeless space which is paradoxically tied to its temporal length of six short weeks. Elio’s watch appears throughout the film in the corner of our vision, a soft but constant reminder of the passage of time in an otherwise fluid landscape. Like many aspects of the film, the passage of its time exists on an axis teetering between reality and unreality. Other expressionistic hues, such as Elio’s narration, nosebleeds and vomiting or Oliver’s creeping wound, aid in painting this portrait of a film. A film about memory, it often feels ungrounded, rather the painting of a moment instead of the photograph. Accompanied by a dreamlike soundtrack, featuring artist Sufjan Stevens, the film moves to with an E. M. Forster-like languidity (unsurprising given James Ivory’s past cinematic forays into Forster’s literary universe).

Directed like a symphony, each part of the film harmoniously clicks together. It is in its details that the film truly lives. “Call Me by Your Name” exists almost solely in the spaces between its two leads, spaces that are so desperately and deliberately maintained. It is a gentle film, but one that carries a powerful cadence.

The camera plays a physical role in the film, its presence felt as a character rather than a tool. It is a study of humanism in its uncomfortably close shots, mutable focus and careful tracking shots. Playing with intimacy and separation alongside Hammer and Chalamet, the camera emphasizes their relationship. Its use of high angles and extreme close-ups allow the audience to alternate between a voyeuristic distance and an intimate closeness in parallel to Oliver and Elio’s own relationship.

Despite many asserting that “Call Me by Your Name” is not a “gay” film, it is absolutely intrinsically a gay film — a fact which is proven by its camera. As director Todd Haynes said in an interview, heterosexuality in film is inherently confirmed by its narrative structure, “an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society.” In much the same way, I would argue that cinematography plays an equal role in destructing the heterosexual narrative in the film.

There is an untold story hidden in “Call Me by Your Name,” perhaps one that is invisible to straight audiences. It is the story of unapologetic queerness. Its structure is inherently gay as it tells the underplayed story of separations, uncertainty and discrimination. The camera is aware of its gayness as it portrays their intimacy through their respective distances which culminate in a mosaic of missed connections, animosity and stolen embraces.

Either hidden in darkness or exposed under blinding light, their actions are a dance between social norms, the timeline of their story gay in its essence. In the two men’s attempts to find solace with each other, the camera allows them their privacy — something that gay men are either fully denied or forced into unfairly — by unfocusing or gently blurring their bodies. When in focus, they are a confusing tangle of legs and arms as two are made into one. The camera is the focal point of their love: It is a window into a world that feels forbidden.

Forbidden worlds are at the center of this Italian garden of Eden. Surrounded by false apples and plenty, the two men express a hunger that manifests itself throughout the landscape as fruit. The peach — a symbol of their love in its bursting ripeness — is our story’s forbidden fruit, a subverted “queered” apple.

And, most poignantly, amidst this idyllic pasture of young gayhood is the reminder of a stirring darkness — AIDs — that swept the gay community in the 70s and 80s. Flies, a universal symbol of illness and death, circle Elio throughout the film, a dark mark in an otherwise perfect world. Remembrance is hidden in the film, the love between Elio and Oliver itself a memory against the backdrop of pestilence. The film’s eternal summer is cut by a snowy winter. Life is cut by death.

Like the camera, the Italian countryside is an expressionist passageway into the mind of Elio. It is itself at odds with Elio: a confusing array of vertical and horizontal lines fill the world with the alternating chaos and harmony that can be found in the film’s pivotal relationship. Elio, often adorned in vertical lines in the beginning, cannot find a place in the horizontal lines of his home and friends. He jarringly clashes against the horizontal walls and terraces, as well as Oliver’s own horizontals. With his sunglasses, Elio carries what blinds him close to his chest — literally and metaphorically — throughout the film. As he dons them around Oliver, yet another subconscious blockade in their relationship is put up.

This ultra-specific artistic direction is at the heart of “Call Me by Your Name.” Heavily influenced by architectural design and statues of antiquity, the film feels like a museum exhibit at times. Playing into its appeal to memory, “Call Me by Your Name” is just as much as a cultural relic as it is a story for modern times. As Elio and Oliver attempt to bridge the gap between them, Elio extends his hand to Oliver, who shakes it with a fragmented arm from a once beautiful statue, now corroded by the sea. A literal link to the past, the film sets up the relationship between Elio and Oliver as a finely sculpted statue. History repeats itself — they too are doomed.

As Elio’s father remarks of the statues, “There’s not a straight line in any of these statues. They’re all curved, as if daring you to desire them.” Curved statues, a subverted ideal of beauty, litter the film: Elio’s own body often curves toward Oliver, his desire frozen in time. Elio and Oliver become as intrinsically a part of a history they have never experienced as they are a part of their own world. Their relationship, even while it is present, occurs as a dream, molded by the ruins of antiquity and the ravages of memory.

The film is an objectively good movie — even a great movie — but to discuss merely its objective appeal would be a disservice to its layered meaning and significance. Without a doubt Chalamet and Hammer both gave career performances which could be dissected on a pros and cons list ad nauseum; but the raw importance of their roles is better left alone. Their emotion is best left undiscovered — untouched — until viewing.

“Call Me by Your Name” is the story of memory, and no matter your circumstances, your life, your history, it will resonate with some part of you. All good art does.